The only other truly sane person Andrea, a school girl, could think of was little Wally Thurston. He too was scared and wanted to address the threat to the town. What a ridiculous irony, that an elevenyear-old was saner than all the adults! was an undercurrent that things were not quite as they should be, but nothing was being done. . . . One Saturday, Mr. Hobbs, the electrician, came around to fix a broken refrigerator at the McKenzies’ house. Andrea ta lked 'to h im abou t w r it in g postcards to the Demon. Mr. Hobbs said to her, “ No time, no time! Too busy fixin’ air conditioners! In this heat wave, they been breakin’ down all over town. I work a 10-hour day as it is, and now it’s up to 11, 12 hours a day, includin’ weekends. I got no time for postcards, Andrea.” And Andrea saw that for Mr. Hobbs, it was true. He had a big family and his children went to parochial school, and he had to pay for them all and. . . . Andrea’s older s is te r ’s boyfriend, Wayne, was a star halfback at Happiton High. One evening he was over and teased Andrea about her postcards. She asked him, “Why don’t you write any, Wayne?” “ I’m out lifeguardin’ every day, and the rest of the time I got scrimmages for the fall season.” “ But you could take some time o u t - just 15 minutes a day—and write a few postcards!” she argued. He just laughed and looked a little fidgety. “ I don’t know, Andrea,” he said, “ anyway, me ‘n Ellen have got better thing to do—huh, Ellen?” Ellen giggled and blushed a little. Than they ran out of the house and jumped into Wayne’s sports car to go bowling at the Happi-Bowl. Andrea was puzzled by all her friends’ attitudes. She couldn’t understand why everyone had started out so concerned but then their concern had fizzled, as if the problem had gone away. One day when she was walking home from school, she saw old Granny Sparks out watering her garden. Granny, as everyone called her, lived kitty-corner from the McKenzies and was always chatty, so Andrea stopped and asked Granny Sparks what she thought of all this. “ Pshaw! Fidd les ticks !” said Granny indignantly. “ Now Andrea, don’t you go around believin’ all that malarkey they print in the newspapers! Things are the game here as they always been. I oughta know—I’ve been livin’ here nigh on 85 years!” Indeed, that was what bothered Andrea. Everything seemed so annoyingly normal. The teenagers with their cruising cars and loud motorcycles. The usual boring horror movies at the Key Theater down on the square across from the courthouse. The band in the park. The parades. And especially, the damn fireflies! Practically nobody seemed moved or affected by what to her seemed the most overwhelming news she’d ever heard. The only other truly sane person she could th ink of was lit t le Wally Thurston, that eleven-year-old from across town. What a ridiculous irony, that an eleven-year-old was saner than all the adults! Long about August 1, there was an editorial in the paper that gave Andrea a real lift. It came from out of the blue. It was written by the paper’s chief editor, “ Buttons” Brown. He was an old-time journalist from St. Jo, Missouri. His editorial was real short. It went like this: The Disobedi-Ant The story of the Disobedi-Ant is very short. It refused to believe that its powerful impulses to play instead of work were anything but unique expressions of its very unique self, and it went its merry way, singing, “What I choose to do has nothing to do with what any-ant else chooses to do! What could be more self-evident?" Coincidentally enough, so went the ■ reasoning of all its colony-mates. In fact, the same refrain was independently invented by every last ant in the colony, and each ant thought it original. It echoed throughout the colony, even with the same melody. The colony perished. Andrea thought this was a terrific allegory, and showed it to all her friends. They mostly liked it, but to her surprise, not one of them s ta r te d w r i t in g postcards. All in all, folks were pretty much back to daily life. After all, nothing much seemed really to have changed. The weather had turned real hot, and folks congregated around the various swimming pools in town. There were lots of barbecues in the evenings, and every once in a while somebody’d make a joke or two about the Demon and the postcards. Folks would chuckle and then change the topic. Mostly, people spent their time doing with they’d always done, and enjoying the blue skies. And mowing their lawns regularly, since they wanted the town to look mce. The a tom ic bom b has changed everything except our way of thinking. And so we drift helplessly toward unparalleled disaster. — Albert Einstein A selection from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas R. Hofstader. 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